Scrum Product Owner – The gift that keeps giving….

So, here we are – a year on from furlough and a year on from not being in the office and one step closer to getting our vaccines and being able to see our friends and family again. And before you think anything…. Yes, this is another blog mentioning COVID and before you loose all interest I promise it will be a good read, well as good as I can make it…

Whilst we were in the midst of lockdown in May last year APS joined our virtual daily stand up meeting via Teams and we discussed how much the working day landscape has shifted and that people have more time due to wfh and basically just not being able to go to pub. It made me think, how many hours do we actually spend in the pub, couldn’t help myself to not share a stat:

‘The typical British man will spend a combined total of more than 10,585 hours or 441 days in the pub in their lifetime while the average British woman, based on a weekly visit to their local, is likely to spend 8,154 hours or 340 days’

That is a lot of happy hours in beer gardens that we can get back to from next week.

SO with the pubs being shut and all this spare time on our hands, naturally people have made it their mission to better themselves either by starting new hobbies or broadening their skills or knowledge. At this point we decided to explore training as a product and with the help of our new partner ThinkAgile, we started to offer online training courses. ThinkAgile offer 100% virtual certified online training in everything from Scrum Master to Product Owner.

I leaped at the opportunity to take their Certified Scrum Product Owner course alongside colleagues. The virtual online course was 2 days starting at 8am finishing at 4pm, purely online. To be perfectly honest I was a little worried that it was going to very mundane and not engaging but it couldn’t have been more the opposite.

On day one we were introduced to our trainers Bevan and Pavel who from the get-go were so lovely. There  were 8 of us in total attending the course. The days were broken down into manageable slots with regular breaks for coffee and a good hour for lunch. So you never felt that you were flagging and this kept everyone immersed and energised.

Now what makes these courses better than any other online course I have done is the collaborative working and the trainer/student engagement. We used a collaborative working tool call Miro – if you have not used it before please take a look. I couldn’t recommend it enough: www.miro.com. It was such a refreshing shift to have a platform that we could all use at the same time. It felt as close to being in the office than it had done in a while, adding ideas and thoughts down on the board as they came to us. Also it built confidence in your own capability which I may personally may not have had if I was learning in a class room. To this day the value that the Certified Scrum Product Owner course has given me has changed the way I work tremendously and continues to do so. THANK YOU BEVAN AND PAVEL!!!